The present invention relates to a contents rental system which rents a contents such as a movie to a customer and more particularly, to a system which can remarkably improve customer's convenience or handleability with use of a large-capacity, removable storage medium accessible at a high speed.
As a video tape recorder (VTR) spreads, many users get a lot of pleasure out of the VTR by renting movie contents in the form of a cassette for the VTR. Further, as the price of a digital versatile disc (DVD) drops in these years, the tendency of the VTR medium is changing predominantly from the cassette tape medium to the DVD.
Such rental shops employ a system in which VTR tape cassettes or DVD discs are stored in the shops and users select the cassettes or discs. However, this system has several problems that a lot of cassettes or discs having movie titles must be stocked and be managed in the inventory on the shop side, whereas, the number of movie titles is insufficient when viewed from the users side.
In order to solve these problems, there is disclosed a proposal to download contents from a server having contents of movie titles recorded therein to a hard disc drive (HDD) owned by a user, which system has been largely increased in capacity in these years, for example, in JP-A-2002-32685.